End of the Line

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

He pulls the two fish from a refrigerator beneath a nearby shed and lays them on the ground. The female, known as a hen, glistens silvery in the wet grass, about 27 inches long. She is a "bright" fish, Kirk explains, not long from the sea. The other fish is smaller, darker, with a pinkish lateral band that denotes a spawning male. Usually the darker the fish, the less desirable to most anglers, though Kirk seems pleased. I ask how long he fought them.

"I don't really know," he replies, "When you catch a fish, time stands still."

Both fish have been fin-clipped; the brand they receive from the hatchery. Wild steelhead populations have dropped so precipitously that anglers are no longer allowed to keep them but instead must release any caught unharmed. Unlike salmon, steelhead can survive to spawn two or three times. But steelhead favor similar spawning grounds as chinook and coho salmon and, like these species, have suffered dramatically from habitat loss and degradation. Young steelhead spend up to three years in fresh water, so they must have streams that are cool, well oxygenated and rich in aquatic and terrestrial insects.

Logging hits them especially hard. Early loggers built splash dams to help transport logs downstream, scouring the streambed in the process. Modern clearcutting also destroys riparian vegetation and shade trees, increasing the water temperature and decreasing available food for young fish. The ensuing erosion often buries spawning gravel with silt.

Two small creeks enter the North Fork not 100 yards from Kirk's home, each draining separate draws in the mountains beyond. In 1979 loggers clear-cut the south side and for nearly five years, Kirk says, its crystal stream ran like coffee. When it finally began to clear, the loggers cut the north side and the second stream began pumping silt into the river.

Kirk wants to show me a nearby hatchery, so we hop in the car and follow a meandering one-lane blacktop that parallels the river. Even in the cold rain, pickups are parked at each bridge, while their owners wade into the dark swirling water, casting continuously. At the hatchery, tiny coho salmon, about three inches long, swim in a series of narrow concrete tanks. They hit the surface like raindrops when Bill and I walk by. That behavior is part of their problem.

In the late 1930s when the first big dams were constructed on the Columbia, Congress passed the Mitchell Act, which funded the building of hatcheries to compensate for lost habitat. At that time, fishery science was still evolving, and hatchery managers naturally concentrated on stocks that prospered in hatcheries, if not in streams. In many rivers, including the North Fork, managers decided to replace wild runs with hatchery fish, stringing an electric weir across the stream to capture native spawners. The endangered Snake River sockeye was the target of a similar enterprise in Idaho.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print